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Re: Pitch learning



for a neuroimaging perspective on learning to associate chord names with their corresponding sound, see:

Bermudez, P. & Zatorre, R.J. (2005) Conditional Associative Memory for Musical Stimuli in Nonmusicians: Implications for Absolute Pitch. Journal of Neuroscience, 25, 7718-7723

the bottom line is that associative memory mechanisms seen in other domains requiring abstract "labelling" seem to be operative, and involve portions of the posterior dorsolateral frontal cortex.

Robert

Ole Kühl wrote:
Martin Braun wrote:
"It's timbre learning. Automatic association of timbre and chroma, the latter
being derived from the summation of octave-spaced partials, results in a
secure "secondary" pitch perception.


An analogy is chord identification. Highly trained musicians can identify
chord categories from the timbre of a chord."
I find this idea very interesting, and believe it to be true as I have long suspected it to be the case that chord learning is actually timbre learning. If there is any empirical evidence for this I would be most grateful for the particulars.
Incidentally, this seems to be not only a higher order function, but also an example of what in the lingo of cognitive semantics would be called conceptual integration or "blending". We could say that we conceptualize a pitch through the integration of information from two different domains: a perceived timbre domain and a learned schema for partials.
Best
Ole
Ole Kühl
kyhl@xxxxxxx <mailto:kyhl@xxxxxxx>
www.cogmus.com <http://www.cogmus.com>

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Robert J. Zatorre, Ph.D.
Montreal Neurological Institute
3801 University St.
Montreal, QC Canada H3A 2B4
phone: 1-514-398-8903
fax: 1-514-398-1338
e-mail: robert.zatorre@xxxxxxxxx
web site: www.zlab.mcgill.ca